As long as there’s been a queer rights movement, there have been people complaining about who should and shouldn’t be a part of it. In his Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, The Deviant’s War, gay historian Eric Cervini writes about the pre-Stonewall gay rights demonstrations led by branches of a group called the Mattachine Society. Protesters for the first-ever gay rights picket in front of the White House in April 1965 had a strict dress code: “the men in suits, ties, white shirts; the women in dresses; all well groomed.” In November 1969, the Mattachine Society of New York called the “small group of militants” behind the Stonewall Riots—largely made up of drag queens, trans folks, kinksters, people of color—“a genuine threat to the movement.”

Today, that respectability-politics conversation reignites every June when people argue about keeping kink out of Pride demonstrations. Likewise with the hand-wringing op-eds that bemoan how the queer rights movement has become “too radical”—especially relating to trans rights, since marriage equality became federal law in 2015. We don’t agree with how those people live, either, these respectable queers seem to promise the mainstream. See, we’re just like you. (For the record, those people are assholes).

Lighton says he never felt the impulse to dial back the film’s BDSM component. What thrilled him was treating kink with sensitivity, not silk gloves. “Leading with sensitivity, I knew, would mean that for audience members who maybe might be judgmental, if they lasted the course of the film, hopefully, they would be illuminated to the kind of warmth and tenderness which exists obviously within the kink scene,” he says.

Gary Wasdin, the executive director of the Chicago-based Leather Archives and Museum, has a succinct response to the idea that artists like Lighton should self-censor in the name of respectability: “Fuck that,” he says over the phone about a week before he moderated a Pillion Q&A at Mid-Atlantic Leather. “Trying to hide something is not going to make conservatives suddenly like you. I think we put too much energy into trying to pretend or protect or hide. And what we really need is visibility.”

Wasdin’s organization, founded in 1991, is an archive, library, and museum dedicated to the history and culture of leather, kink, fetish, and BDSM, and visibility is a big part of its mission. Wasdin says he was skeptical when he first heard about the film—not out of fear of how Lighton would portray the community, but because past pop-culture representations of kink have been filmic boner-killers.

Wasdin is happy that the book Fifty Shades of Grey got people reading—he’s a librarian, after all, but says the movie was “not a very good depiction of what kink is all about, and what people in the BDSM community are.”

Few mainstream movies have gotten kink right, beginning with 1980’s Cruising, shock-value voyeurism from William Friedkin, with Al Pacino as an undercover cop investigating a serial killer in New York’s gay S&M scene. 2002’s Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader as co-workers in a dom-sub relationship, skips over the consent discussion, and veers surreal where Pillion keeps its booted feat on the ground. A24’s beautifully acted and filmed 2024 erotic thriller Babygirl—starring CEO Nicole Kidman as a CEO and Harris Dickinson as a young intern at her company—does captures consent well, but the power-play is still rendered as something that alters lives by destroying professional and personal relationships, not a means to self-discovery.